STGI

“Successful Techniques in Grammar Instruction” by Carl B. Smith, Darra M. Ellis, and Deb Hall

• Grammar study needs to be practical; students need to understand the connection between grammar and communication, using both written and verbal language.
• The focus has shifted away from rote memorization and diagramming sentences.
• Instructors cannot teach grammar as a separate concept from writing, reading, and awareness/understanding of literature.

• Word Study
  • Teaches spelling, vocabulary, and grammar instruction by exploring the relationship of spelling to word meaning and grammar.
  • Students group words into categories that compare and contrast according to spelling and meaning, then use the patterns identified to better comprehend a word’s definition and grammatical purpose (not just part of speech).
• Grammar Study in Authentic Contexts
  • Studying how grammar works should play a cooperative role in teaching reading and writing, rather than being a central focus.
  • As students grow in experience with new literature, their syntactic structures develop, which in turn improves their performance in reading and writing.
  • These syntactic skills are attained through reading and listening to tales, participating in group oral readings, modeling sentence structures through writing, dialogue journals, and the processes of revising and editing.
  • Developing “sentence structure literacy” through sentence building (beginning with a simple sentence and tacking on additional words and phrases), constructing and deconstructing complex sentences encountered in readings, and using the cloze procedure.
• Revisiting Grammar Instruction
  • Less emphasis should be placed on the teaching of rules than understanding the relationship between grammar and effective written and verbal communication.
  • The most effective construct begins with concrete concepts and the proceeds to semi-concrete and abstract concepts.
  • Students should understand the five commonly used sentence patterns: subject-predicate, subject-predicate-direct object, subject-predicate-predicate adjective, subject-predicate-predicate noun, and subject-predicate-indirect object-direct object.